Signwave by Andrew Vachss Page B

that—I’d once made Dolly nearly jump out of her jeans years ago. “You never made a sound,” she’d said, hands on hips like I’d done something wrong.
    There wasn’t any point explaining that moving through brush like cigarette smoke through a mesh screen was ingrained in me. Too many years of training, too many years prowling hostile jungle—if they knew I was coming, they’d be waiting. Those times when fear was my most cherished friend. Now I always warn people I’m coming.
    If I want them to know, I mean.
    Franklin and Mack turned in my direction. Minnie was already looking, not making a sound herself, the tensed muscles twitching all along her hindquarters.
    “Franklin’s going to come over and show me and Bridgette how we can make a better yard.”
    “Franklin knows his stuff,” I said to Mack.
    “You know who’s coming for a visit, Mr. Dell?” the big man burst out, unable to contain himself any longer.
    “MaryLou?” I said. A safe guess—there wasn’t another person on this earth who could get Franklin so excited at the prospect of a visit.
    “Yes! She’s got four weeks off. And now that I’ve got my own place, she wouldn’t have to—”
    “Why don’t you bring her over for dinner?” Mack asked him.
    “You and…you and your wife?”
    “Sure.”
    “I bet she’d love that,” the giant said. What he didn’t say was that MaryLou would love the idea of Franklin’s having a friend like Mack. The only other friend of his she knew about was me, and I wasn’t her favorite person. MaryLou knew what I could do, and she didn’t want Franklin learning any of it. Unlike most, she knew Franklin could learn all kinds of things.
    “Then it’s done,” Mack said.
    The giant bent down and patted Minnie’s shovel-shaped head. “MaryLou is going to love
you
, too,” he promised the pit.
    —
    “J ust make sure she understands this isn’t some kind of…social-worker thing, okay?” I told Mack.
    “MaryLou’s not
that
suspicious, Dell,” Dolly said.
    “Not of you, honey.”
    “
You’re
the one that’s suspicious of everyone,” my wife said. And I had no comeback—it was the truth.
    “MaryLou knows I keep my promises” was the best I could do.
    “Well, there you go. Isn’t that enough?”
    “You’re probably right,” I lied. “Still, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just…”
    “All
right
,” my woman said, as if giving in to a stubborn child. The truth is, she’s the stubborn one in our family. Once Dolly plants her feet, a steamroller would bounce off her. She didn’t know exactly why MaryLou was so confident that I’d keep my word, and it wasn’t something she needed to know.
    —
    I ’d kept my promise to MaryLou when I tracked that pile of toxic waste to his new home in Denver.
    He wasn’t calling himself Ryan Teller then. I don’t know what they put on his tombstone—or even if he got one.
    So MaryLou believed that, when I said I’d do something, I would.
    If she had so much as suggested that the boy she’d killed was “bothering” her, Franklin would have pulled his head off his body. But MaryLou was nothing like her foul little sister—she wouldn’t use people, especially a man she knew truly loved her. And she knew I was a different species—I wouldn’t care what I had to use to get something done.
    MaryLou had come so close to throwing her life away on a psychopathic prodigy. Maybe that’s why she was so fiercely protective of the only person in her world that she knew would never betray her.
    —
    “W hen’re we gonna see some damn action?”
    I didn’t know why that fool who spoke only the few words of French that La Légion required us to learn worked so hard at letting the rest of us know how eager he was to see combat. But even though I was still a very young man, I’d already learned enough to know he wasn’t broadcasting to any of us—he was convincing himself. Trying to, anyway.
    “That’s not ours to decide,” Patrice told